Uncategorized
YIVO digitizes writer Chaim Grade’s archive, a Yiddish treasure with a soap opera backstory
(JTA) — Years ago, when I worked at the Forward, I had a cameo in a real-life Yiddish drama.
A cub reporter named Max Gross sat just outside my office, where he answered the phones. A frequent caller was Inna Grade, the widow of the Yiddish writer Chaim Grade and a fierce guardian of his literary legacy. Mrs. Grade would badger poor Max in dozens of phone calls, especially when a Forward story referred kindly to the Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer. Grade’s widow described Singer as a “blasphemous buffoon” whose fame and reputation, she was convinced, came at the expense of her husband’s.
As Max explains in his 2008 memoir, “From Schlub to Stud,” Mrs. Grade “became a bit of a joke around the paper.” And yet in Yiddish literary circles, her protectiveness of one of the 20th century’s most important Yiddish writers was serious business: Because Inna Grade kept such a tight hold on her late husband’s papers — Chaim Grade (pronounced “Grah-deh”) died in 1982 — a generation of scholars was thwarted in taking his true measure.
Inna Grade died in 2010, leaving no signed will or survivors, and the contents of her cluttered Bronx apartment became the property of the borough’s public administrator. In 2013, Chaim Grade’s personal papers, 20,000-volume library, literary manuscripts and publication rights were awarded to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the National Library of Israel. They are now stored in YIVO headquarters on Manhattan’s W. 16th Street.
This week YIVO and the NLI will announce the completion of the digitization of “The Papers of Chaim Grade and Inna Hecker Grade,” making the entire archive publicly accessible online. When the folks at YIVO invited me to come and look at the Grade collection, I knew I had to invite Max, not just because of his connection to Inna Grade but because he has become a critically acclaimed novelist in his own right: His 2020 novel “The Lost Shtetl,” which imagines a Jewish village in Poland that has somehow escaped the Holocaust, is in many ways an homage to the Yiddish literary tradition.
We met on Thursday with the YIVO staff, who were tickled by the T-shirt Max was wearing, which had a picture of Chaim Grade and the phrase “Grade is my homeboy.” (Max said his wife bought it for him, although neither could imagine the market for such a shirt.)
Stefanie Halpern, director of the YIVO archives, and novelist Max Gross discuss a thick file containing news clippings relating to the late Yiddish novelist Chaim Grade at YIVO’s Manhattan offices, Feb. 2, 2023. (New York Jewish Week)
The Grade papers — manuscripts, photographs, correspondence, lectures, speeches, essays — are stored in folders in gray boxes, whose neatness belies the years of effort that went into putting them in order. Jonathan Brent, executive director and CEO of YIVO, described for us the Grades’ apartment, which he visited shortly after Inna’s death.
“It was like a combination of my grandmother’s apartment and a writer’s home,” he said. “Everything was books, books to the ceiling. You open a drawer in the kitchen where you think there’ll be knives and forks, there are books, there are manuscripts. You open the cabinet in the bathroom, there are more manuscripts and books and books…. But the thing I remember most is that at the top of a shelf there was that much dust.” He held his fingers about two inches apart.
Inna Grade was Chaim Grade’s second wife. The writer was born in Vilna (now in Lithuania) in 1910. He was able to flee east during the Nazi occupation, leaving behind his mother and his first wife under the assumption that the Germans would only target adult men. It was a tragic miscalculation, and their deaths would haunt Grade the rest of his life. Inna Hecker was born in Ukraine in 1925, and met Grade in Moscow during the war. Married in 1945, they immigrated to the United States in 1948.
Chaim Grade had already established a reputation as a poet, playwright and prose stylist before the war; English translations of his novels “The Agunah” and “The Yeshiva” and serial publication of his novels in the Yiddish press brought him recognition in America for what the Yiddish scholar Ruth Wisse calls a “Dostoyevskian talent to animate in fiction the destroyed Talmudic civilization of Europe.” Columbia University professor Jeremy Dauber, in a YIVO release, says that Grade was possessed “by the spirit of the yeshiva world he’d left behind; then possessed by the spirits and memories of those who’d been murdered by the Nazis.”
Stefanie Halpern, director of the YIVO archives, showed us the physical evidence of that possession: Grade’s notebooks, in which he wrote down ideas and inspiration in a careful Yiddish script; manuscripts for at least two unpublished dramatic works, “The Dead Can’t Rise Up” and “Hurban” (“Sacrifice”); a photograph of Grade standing amidst the ruins of Vilna during his only visit after the war; pictures of the Bronx apartment taken when the couple was still alive, book-filled but still tidy.
Halpern also showed us the Yiddish typewriter recovered from the apartment, with what is believed to be the last page he worked on still rolled in its platen.
Chaim Grade’s typewriter, preserved in the condition it was found when the Yiddish author died in 1982, contains what are apparently the last lines he ever wrote. (New York Jewish Week)
The archivists are also careful to give Inna her due. After arriving in America she studied literature and received a master’s degree from Columbia, and often translated her husband’s work. Thanks to her, hundreds of clippings of Grade’s work and articles about him have survived.
Her correspondence reflects the lengths she went to protect her husband’s legacy during and after his lifetime, including a bizarre and lengthy letter to the Vatican complaining about Singer. “She was a brilliant and creative person, devoted in a way only a widow can be,” said Brent. “And perhaps devoted to a maddening extent.”
If all that sounds like the stuff of Jewish fiction, it is: In 1969, Cynthia Ozick wrote a novella called “Envy; or, Yiddish in America,” about Yiddish writers very much like Grade consumed with envy for a writer very much like Singer. “They hated him for the amazing thing that had happened to him — his fame — but this they never referred to,” wrote Ozick. “Instead they discussed his style: his Yiddish was impure, his sentences lacked grace and sweep, his paragraph transitions were amateur, vile.”
Halpern showed us a mailgram from Inna to the Forward that makes it clear that she and her husband read and hated the story. In it she describes Ozick as “no less grotesque than evil.”
For all of the gothic Yiddish aspects of its retrieval, “this is probably the single most important literary acquisition in YIVO’s postwar history,” Brent said of the archive. He described publishing projects already underway with Schocken Books and other publishers that will draw on the material.
Max and I discussed what it felt like to see what had become “a bit of a joke” around the Forward office placed at the center of an epic exercise in literary preservation. Max was struck by the way Inna’s personality came through in the papers. “This was her,” he said. “Her obsession, her struggle, all these things. It was definitely remarkable to see that.”
I recalled overhearing his conversations with Inna, and how her behavior could seem funny and exasperating, but also admirable and more than a little sad — in that her devotion to her husband’s reputation may also have prevented scholars from doing the work that would have made him better known.
“Exactly, but that’s one of the reasons why you get into Yiddish literature, because all of these things are true at the same time,” said Max. “Those kinds of scores, rivalries, feuds within Yiddish literature is what is so great about it. It is great to see that somebody really cared and that literature was taken so seriously. And the pettiness was something you couldn’t quite divest from the rest of it.”
—
The post YIVO digitizes writer Chaim Grade’s archive, a Yiddish treasure with a soap opera backstory appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
The original anti-Zionists have been all but forgotten. Molly Crabapple wants to change that.
I first met nationally acclaimed artist and journalist Molly Crabapple in 2020 during the dark days of COVID. After discovering that we had both studied Yiddish at YIVO, albeit in different classes, we did a socially distanced fresh-air visit to Mt. Carmel, the Jewish cemetery in Queens where Sholem Aleichem is buried. Many tombstones there are inscribed not in Hebrew but in Yiddish. They include the graves of people who, in life, belonged to the Bund.
Founded in 1897 in Eastern Europe, the Bund was a socialist revolutionary group whose name, translated from Yiddish to English, is General Jewish Labor Union (“bund” is Yiddish for union). By the 1930s, Bundism in Poland, where most Ashkenazic Jews lived, had grown bigger and more politically powerful than Zionism. The group was a tireless promoter of Yiddish as the linguistic and literary underpinning of Jewish peoplehood. Bundists also fiercely opposed Zionism and a Jewish state; they believed in fighting for democracy and inclusion in the countries where Jews already lived.
The organization ended up being destroyed not just by the Nazi Holocaust but also by Stalinism. Except for people like me, who’ve been ensconced in the Yiddishist world, it is nearly forgotten today by all but a few academics. But by the time we met, Crabapple was writing a book about the Bund.
Almost six years later, she has finished it. Titled Here Where We Live is Our Country, it is part hefty historical documentation, part loving family memoir, and part literary nonfiction. Thoroughly engaging throughout, it moves back and forth from the author’s lefty-artsy life in contemporary New York City to earthshaking events in vintage Jewish Europe. Crabapple has disinterred the memory of a once-vibrant movement that waned even as its nemesis, Zionism, waxed.
I met her last month in her fifth-floor walkup apartment in Williamsburg to talk about how she made her book. Our conversation is edited for length and clarity.
Here Where We Live devotes significant space to the saga of your great-grandfather, Sam Rothbort. As a young man in 1904, he immigrated from the Pale of Settlement to New York City, under somewhat murky circumstances that he barely discussed after the move. In America, he made a living as a self-taught artist, including on a dairy farm in the Catskills, an egg farm in Long Island and in a big house near Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn. But he died over a decade before you were born. When did you first realize he’d been an interesting guy who you wanted to tell the world about?
I was fucking born knowing he was interesting! My mother and my great-aunt and my dad told me about him constantly. I was surrounded by his paintings and stuff that he said. After he died, my great-aunt Ida still lived in his house. As a child, I would visit and it was exactly like when he was alive. I remember the pigments and oils still on the palette in the basement.
How did you find out he’d been in the Bund?
I’d always known he was involved in something illegal before he came to the United States. It was a cool family anecdote. In a book from 1952 that he published about his art, he wrote that as a teenager and young man he hadn’t known much about girls because “I was in the underground.” Another book, a catalogue of his art from a show, said he’d been in the Bund. My mom had a million of those catalogues in a bookcase, and I’d been looking at them since I was 11 or 12 years old. I also saw one of his watercolors, of a woman throwing a rock. He’d titled it “Itka the Bundist Breaking Windows.”
I had very little idea then of what “the Bund” was. But as an adult, one of my bad habits has been that sometimes when I get drunk, I Google things. That might be how I first understood.
From his own unpublished writing, you later found evidence suggesting that Sam might have fled to America at age 22 because he’d joined other Bundists in shooting a Tsarist policeman during a state-encouraged pogrom. You also read the yizkor book for Volkovysk, a town in what is now Belarus. It was Sam’s hometown. He is cited in the book as having helped produce its chapter about the Bund.
Look at this! [She walks me to her bedroom and points to an antique photograph on the wall.] When I was younger I’d always only thought of this as a very cool old picture that my mom had. But this same photo is in the yizkor book! It says it’s the members of the Volkovysk Bund in 1905. It’s Sam’s friends a year after he left for America. Look at this guy in the photo — he’s hot! Which one do you like the best?
The blonde.
Ugh!
I got really obsessed trying to track down these guys. When I went to the cemetery where my great-grandfather is buried I saw the tombstone of one of them. Later, in a box of family memorabilia, I found a photo of this same person in an old Yiddish news clip about people in New York City who were in the Workmen’s [now Workers] Circle’s Volkovysk branch. I asked the cemetery who was paying to maintain the grave. It was this guy’s grandson. I contacted him and he said his own father was still alive but very old. “Can you just ask him to look at this photo and see if that’s his dad?” I asked. I said I was writing about a revolutionary group. He says, “My grandfather never would have been involved in that! He was a truck driver.” And he hung up.
Why couldn’t the grandson entertain this history about his grandfather? Why did he not know it?
The Bund was an organization incredibly devoted to Yiddish language and literature. But it was also a socialist revolutionary political party. One thing I’ve noticed about how it has been written about is that certain things are de-emphasized and certain things emphasized. In the 1950s in the U.S. in the McCarthy years, Bundist survivors of the Holocaust were terrified they would be accused of being Communists, and deported. They had no faith that Americans would know the difference between a socialist and a communist. I think that sometimes the Bund’s’ Yiddishism is emphasized far more than the fact that they were revolutionaries. To focus on linguistic and cultural things is safe. To talk about revolutionaries as internationalists — and as people who always opposed Zionism — is dangerous.
Were you raised Jewish?
My father is Puerto Rican and a Latin American studies professor who’s a Marxist. He told me about Marx’s theory of surplus value when I was 6 years old. I’ve been a leftist in a leftist family all my life! My mother — Sam’s granddaughter — is very strongly culturally Jewish. When I was a child we’d do Hanukkah lights, and she made the best latkes. We were not religious, but I identify strongly as a secular Jew. I studied Yiddish in order to do research for the book. I’m not so good at Yiddish, but I can work my way through a socialist text using a dictionary.
I remember when we were at the cemetery and you were so excited about having just discovered that the political work of some Bundists in Poland was armed self-defense. They fought in militias, with their bodies and with weapons, to protect Jews from murderous pogroms, murderous Communist Party violence against socialists, and, finally, murderous Nazis. You called these militia members “thugs.”
I loved them!
You mentioned their resistance in a piece you wrote in 2018 for the New York Review of Books about the organization. I’ve heard that many people were astounded and very happy to learn about this self-defense and to discover the Bund.
Especially young Jews, like in their 20s. They had no idea that Jews had fought back in Europe even before the Holocaust, or they had only vague ideas about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and that Bundists played a major role in it. It was very meaningful for them.
So much for the idea that only Zionists have been modern Jewish fighters.
Zionists have tried to say that they were the only tough Jews. Which is utterly untrue.
What do you think is most original about your book?
It’s very concerned with the emotional life of being in a movement. I think that sometimes the way that leftist movements are written about is as a series of conferences and decisions that are written down as texts, and people sign onto a resolution because that’s what they are thinking. The writing doesn’t show any awareness of emotional life. The love affairs, the gossip, the beefs that are going on, the thrill of thinking that you can change the world. I was much more concerned with that.
And as I worked on the book I quickly realized that I wasn’t just writing about the Bund. I was writing a history of the 20th century from the point of view of the defeated. The work was a form of necromancy. I would go to people’s graves and take dirt, and light candles in front of it and try to ask them if I could tell their story. At Ponary Forest, [near Vilna, where at least one prominent Bundist leader, a woman, was massacred by the Nazis in World War II and dumped into a mass pit] I went to the bottom with flowers and played Di Shvue [Yiddish for “The Oath,” the Bund’s anthem] on my phone.
What do you mainly hope that your book will accomplish?
I want leftists to know about something from our shared international history as leftists. I want young Jews to get to know their ancestors.
The Bund was anti-Zionist, of course, and many young American Jews are now also rejecting Zionism.
Yes. A lot of them were sold a bill of goods about their history, and when they reject that bill of goods, there’s a big hole in them. They don’t have any actual, positive Jewish history. They just have shit they’re ashamed of, because they realize [that Zionism] was actually a history of ethnic cleansing and apartheid. One of the things my book does is give them ancestors.
I’m an anti-Zionist. Whenever you have an ethnostate project, it always does unspeakable crimes. If Jewish institutions in America keep conflating Jews here with a state that is doing a livestreamed genocide and is now primarily known for the most heinous shit possible, it’s extremely dangerous for us Jews, as a small minority in America.
Some people internationally have been starting new Bund groups. What future do you see in that? And can you imagine Yiddish being resurrected as a secular Jewish language?
It’s hard to imagine huge numbers of people adopting Yiddish. But I think about a Jewish literary figure in the 1930s whom Isaac Deutscher quotes in his book The Non-Jewish Jew. He said that Yiddish was a dying language. But he didn’t mind, because Greek and Latin are dead languages, yet many people study them anyway, to access their linguistic treasures. And God bless everyone who’s doing leftist, anti-Zionist organizing and cultural work reclaiming our heritage! But is there a future for the Bund? The thing I’ve learned both from reading history and being a participant is, you never know what the spark is going to be. So you should always avoid making prognostications.
The post The original anti-Zionists have been all but forgotten. Molly Crabapple wants to change that. appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Georgia political candidate apologizes for Passover ad that featured challah
(JTA) — When readers of the Atlanta Jewish Times opened their Passover edition last week, they saw something surprising: a fluffy challah.
The leavened bread, forbidden for Jews to consume during the holiday, appeared in an ad placed by Nathalie Kanani, a candidate for state Senate in a Metro Atlanta district.
“Have a blessed Passover,” the ad said, over an image of a challah draped in an Israeli flag alongside two towering candles. “Wishing you a Passover rich in divine love and blessings.”
The ad quickly drew ridicule online, particularly after Greg Bluestein, a Jewish Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter, tweeted about it on Saturday, writing, “It’s the thought that counts, I guess.”
That night, Kanani issued an apology, calling the inclusion of challah in the ad “an oversight that should not have happened” and saying that her campaign was instituting new processes to prevent similar snafus in the future.
“My intent was to honor our Jewish neighbors and friends. We are all human, and even with the best intentions, honest mistakes can happen,” she wrote. “I believe in meeting those moments with grace and using them to bring people of different cultures together, not tear them apart.”
Kanani added, “While this content was created by a consultant working with my campaign, I take full responsibility for everything shared in my name. We are implementing stronger review processes to ensure this does not happen again. As always, my campaign stands for inclusion, respect, and bringing all people together.”
The incident is also spurring potential reforms at the Atlanta Jewish Times. “The ad should not have passed proofing checks,” Michael Morris, the newspaper’s owner and publisher, wrote in an email to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Sunday.
Kanani’s apology earned the Democrat dozens of supportive comments on Facebook — as well as constructive criticism that highlighted the complexity of Jewish American identity.
“We all make mistakes and learn from the[m],” wrote one man. “If you want to honor your Jewish neighbors, however, you might also want to rethink using a foreign flag. While many (though not all) of us, myself included, feel close ties to Israel (if not its government and policies), American Jews are Americans, not foreigners.”
Another woman offered an opposing take. “If you want to reach out to the Jewish community then you need to hire a Jewish consultant for Jewish content. Not only was the picture a big gaffe that you are undoubtable being mocked relentlessly for, but the wording sounds Christian,” she wrote. “But I do appreciate the Israeli flag.”
Kanani’s ad is not the first Passover bread to ignite a social media firestorm: The sight of leavened bread at Christian seders, which have surged in recent years, has generated sharp criticism in the past.
Unlike the Christian seders, which are widely denounced as appropriative, Kanini’s ad also elicited appreciation at a time when antisemitism is making many American Jews feel insecure.
“Unpopular opinion: we shouldn’t dunk on non-Jews who are trying to be nice to Jews,” tweeted David Greenfield, the head of a Jewish anti-poverty organization in New York City.
Kanani is a former prosecutor who is running in the May primary against Kevin Abel, who says his values are rooted in his identity as a South Africa-born Jew whose grandfather escaped Nazi Germany. Abel has chaired the American Jewish Committee’s local antisemitism task force.
Esther Panitch, a Jewish member of the Georgia House, urged her followers to back Abel when criticizing Kanani’s ad.
“Bless her heart, someone put challah in a Passover ad. This candidate wants to be my senator,” she tweeted on Saturday. “As the only Jewish member of the Georgia General Assembly, I am available for holiday consults — or you could just consider a candidate who knows the difference, whose ad is just a few pages after this one.”
After Kanani’s apology, Panitch said she had heard from Kanani’s campaign.
“I appreciate Nathalie Kanani’s campaign reaching out and taking responsibility for the challah-in-a-Passover-ad mix-up,” she wrote on Facebook. “Mistakes happen. What matters is how you respond, and she responded with grace. This is how we build understanding across communities. My door is always open for holiday consults. 
“
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Georgia political candidate apologizes for Passover ad that featured challah appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
4 killed in Haifa strike as Trump issues ‘you’ll be living in Hell’ ultimatum to Tehran
(JTA) — Four people — including a couple in their 80s — were killed when an Iranian missile crashed into their home in Haifa on Sunday, in the latest direct strike in the month-old U.S.-Israeli war with Iran.
The missile was not intercepted because it had broken off from a larger munition, determined Israeli authorities, who said the people killed were not in their building’s bomb shelter at the time of the strike.
The strike brings the civilian death toll in Israel to 18 as uncertainty reigns about the future of the war, with U.S. President Donald Trump threatening multiple times over the weekend to pummel Iran imminently if it does not reopen the Strait of Hormuz to oil shipping imminently.
“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!!” Trump wrote on Truth Social early Sunday. “Open the F–kin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”
Iran offered no indication that it would meet Trump’s deadline, which comes as the president has extended previous deadlines for action by Tehran. A top Iranian official said the regime would respond “crushingly and extensively” to further attacks on civilian targets, including power plants and bridges. And a spokesman for the foreign ministry responded to questions about a reported framework for a ceasefire by saying, “Negotiations are in no way compatible with ultimatums, crimes, or threats of war crimes.”
The sparring comes after a dramatic weekend in the war. U.S. forces rescued an airman whose plane had been shot down during a commando raid in rural Iran, while Israel said it had killed the intelligence chief of the Islamic Republic Revolutionary Guards during a strike on an office building in Tehran.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post 4 killed in Haifa strike as Trump issues ‘you’ll be living in Hell’ ultimatum to Tehran appeared first on The Forward.